Tips and tricks for modern system administrator

html5

A couple of years ago I was talking with my colleages in those years about security in some websites. We were not talking about SSL (which is, by the way more popuplar now), because SSL only works at connection level. With SSL you can guarantee that the communication is reliable (in terms of authenticity) and that the endpoint server is actually who pretend to be.

But SSL hides a shameful secret, a flaw in the design which can provoke, eventually, a big security problem. This neglected detail is too evident that no one think very mucho about it: “SSL doesn’t guarantee you anything about the content that you are viewing”.

We can build an imaginary experiment. Let’s suppose that a big e-commerce web site which has payments enabled for their customers wants to fire an employment. That employment is a good qualified programmer with access to the site source code. Before they fired the worker, he modify the source code to add a very small piece of code (buried in a millions of lines of e-commerce code) which just change a little bit thing. The action of the payment HTML form now send credit card data to an anonymous web service running in some weird country.

Now, let’s do another exercise in imagination. Suppose you are an unsuspecting user who loves products of our company. You buy a couple of goods, and probably you pay with your credit card… Ops! Back a moment… Now your credit card data is stored in a probably not very safe database in one server located in our Weird Country, ready to be sold to anyone who can pay for that kind of information (and I can assure you that they aren’t good people).

In this case SSL is green. Is the real server with a trust communication. But in this case SSL doesn’t help us to avoid the crime. That’s the reason why we need content signing eventually.

Thinking about this problem I create a way to facilitate this implementation. The core of the idea is the attribute data-signature. This attribute can be used in any HTML5 block, and it’s a signature of the HTML representation of all childs of the block which has the attribute. So, for example in the following code:

The signature is valid for the HTML <p>Some paragraph</p>. We don’t need to sign the comment (nothing important could be saved there). The signature algorithm is, right now irrelevant. We work on that point some paragraphs below.

Of course, nested blocks can be signed also.

With this approximation, we are sure that the content of the div block is genuine, because we assume that the developer has no access to master keys to sign critical data. In out store example, the critical data is just the form block, and needs to be hard coded, but, anyway, this is usually a fixed string in a template.

Finally we need to talk a little bit about the algorithm to sign. We can use any public key based algorithm, and the only problem is how can we check that the signature is right. Well, there are a lot of solutions for that problem.

One solution could be that the browser (or browser extension ;)) validate the signature looking for the public key associated with the domain in a public CA (or web of trust model).

So, this is a simple way to validate HTML blocks and put more security in web sites. Do you think that this kind of systems are necessary? or convenient? Do you know any other way to sign content in web sites?